Statin Island

So, nearly half the UK population is on prescription medications - and, in a related development, Microbial Apocalypse looms, as a result of reckless overuse of antibiotics. How very strange all this would have seemed to the founders of the National Health Service, who genuinely believed that, once the NHS was up and running, it wouldn't be needed for long, as an increasingly healthy population had less and less need for medication. Similarly, the welfare state was expected to more or less wither on the vine as rising prosperity lifted almost everybody out of poverty.
 In practice, the huge initial surge of demand for spectacles, false teeth and uterine prolapse correction very nearly sank the NHS as soon as it was launched. And, with demand remaining infinitely elastic and the service continuing to appear 'free', the result is what we see today - an increasingly unhealthy (or, rather, differently unhealthy) population scoffing astonishing amounts of medication, much of which is probably useless or even harmful. It was never meant to be like this when those starry-eyed idealists were building the postwar New Jerusalem. Never underestimate the delusions of idealists.